Evaluation of our creative project (practice)

As our filming location was restricted to just the College building, we wanted to shape a narrative that would appear relevant to this location, and not be over the top or unbelievable. Also, as I have said before, when watching 'La Haine' another film based on power poverty and conflict, we noticed that the narrative and action was set out against a political context that affected the central characters. These were two key inspirational factors that we used to shape our film, which hopefully resulted in this: a political context that affects the protagonist, but at the same time, it is a context that is believable relaxant to the location and the characters. That is why we opted to use the news concerning rising tuition fees for universities in England as our political context. What's believable about it is that should these scheme be approved (I heard the news on Thursday night, bad times...), a number of students will be affected. They will simply feel that because of rising the cost of fees up to £9,000 a year, higher education will just seem 'too impossible' to reach from a financial aspect. This how we aim to show poverty - students are denied opportunity because of what something costs. However, when filming this, I felt that the dialogue was very compressed in the sense that the only thing the viewer will see is a rebellious, whiny student. Also, our script did not take as long to film as I thought it would, so some sections of dialogue were improvised on the day. While there is nothing wrong with improvisation, I was concerned that the viewer may find this section to be a bit too general, and not dealing with the context. That it will appear as nothing more than a 'for and against' argument about university, something that happened and will continue to happen if fees were raised or not.

However, something that I feel we have done well is made out political context clear. We begin the film by showing a computer monitor that contain a web-page of a news article about the raise in tuition fees. I feel that when seeing this, the audience will be less-likely to question why we have chosen to include our created characters as they have seen why they behave in the way that they do. By doping this, we are also hoping to show an element of power - the power of parliament and the strain that it will inflict amongst generations of young people to come. Unfortunately, the way that we wanted to present conflict became less powerful due to the fact that when writing the script, I had included too many lines for the person playing the Teacher character to learn in a short space of time before filming. The dialogue was quite forceful (see below), I had written this when thinking of (again, no named mentioned) teachers who are strongly encouraging of getting student to apply to university.

"That’s ridiculous! You have to go to University, because what else are going to do? Nothing, that’s what! Without education, you’ll be nothing! This college will have nothing to show for your generation if you all said that you ‘can’t afford’ to go to university, so there are no excuses! Get a move on!"

We wanted this dialogue and this character to reflect conflict. He presents a contrasting view on going to university, appearing to care little for the student's excuses for not wanting to go. All he is concerned about is having impressive work to show from students who had studied at the college - like trophies on a shelf. What I fear is that, as this dialogue became compressed, the conflict that we were trying to present will appear less powerful to the viewer.

Before writing this script extract, I have had experience with scriptwriting. However, this was not for film, but for theatre, so when writing this, I found that I had to restrain myself from writing stage directions and find a way to represent the aspects of power, poverty and conflict as if they were written for the screen, and not the stage. This was a challenge, but I challenged that I liked as it has given me preparation for when I write my screenplay for the real creative project. I will think back to this experience when creating this and try to apply a similar writing style to what I have done now. Also, I have learnt that when writing scripts, I need to consider how much time there is before filming must happen. This is so that when working with others, they can learn dialogue effectively and give better performances. This will decrease the chance of having last-minute hitches on the day of filming, meaning that we can use time much more efficiently.